GPO Liaison System Engineer

Scope

This project augments the ORCA/BEN project which was started at the beginning of Spiral 1, and which provides the code for the ORCA control framework.

This project will augment the features of the current ORCA Control Framework prototype and integrate work from other relevant GENI projects to substantially increase the capabilities of the framework in the areas of:

As the capabilities of ORCA are increased, they will be made available to the associated projects in Cluster D.

In particular, it will assist in the integration of the Integrated Measurement Framework (IMF) and related tools being developed in a separate project, to enable advanced cross-layer experiments in the BEN regional optical network.

It will integrate Shibboleth identity providers (IdPs) and SAML security assertions into ORCA to support: IdP-endorsed credential attributes; the use of attributes for authorization; and proxy authentication, which would enable users to delegate credentials to software entities acting on their behalf.

It will add Orca interfaces (handler and driver plugins) for edge cluster substrates managed by Eucalyptus, a popular virtual/cloud computing systems, and integrate it into ORCA. Eucalyptus is an open-source Xen-based virtual cloud manager designed to resemble Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and cloud storage services.

In cooperation with the ORBIT project, it will extend the Network Description Language (NDL), an OWL-based ontology schema, by developing common ontology specifications and a common set of tools, to better describe all resources being integrated into ORCA and ORBIT. And, it will enable dynamic resource discovery, including the ability to query a broker about resources available.